Boston Flora

Tag: Concord Museum

  • Saturday, December 3, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm – Concord Holiday House Tour

    On Saturday, December 3, 2016 from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., a selection of Concord’s most beautiful private homes will be professionally decorated in the holiday spirit by local and Boston-based interior designers. Guests will be welcomed inside the front doors of these gracious private residences to visit the charming ground floor rooms. From Colonial to Victorian to Shingle Style and more, each house will be decorated in a different holiday theme. The Concord Museum welcomes you to spend the day in Concord, a small town with a big history, and enjoy the elegant streets, charming cafés and shops, as well as the many historic homes.

    The Guild of Volunteers is organizing this event as a benefit for the education initiatives of the Museum. The 2016 House Tour Co-Chairs are Kim Picullel, Colleen Van Houten, and Sarah Walton. Tickets may be purchased online, at the Museum, or by phone. Tickets and maps must be picked up at the Museum the day of the tour.

    Advanced discount tickets through December 1: $40 Museum Members, $45 Non-Members. December 2 or day of: $45 Members, $50 Non-Members. Purchase tickets at http://www.concordmuseum.org/special-events-house-tour.php

  • Friday and Saturday, June 3 and 4, 9:00 am – 4:00 pm – Concord Museum Garden Tour

    This year the Concord Museum is celebrating 27 years of “going into good gardens” on the annual Concord Garden Tour.

    The Museum’s Guild of Volunteers has organized the garden tour, an opportunity both to share in the delights of beautiful and historic private gardens in Concord and to support the Museum’s Education Programs which annually serve 10,000 students from 85 Massachusetts communities and 22 states.

    The Museum’s Garden Tour has become a New England tradition for garden lovers from near and far. The Garden Tour will take place on two days, Friday and Saturday, June 3 and June 4, rain or shine. Each of the private gardens reflects the individual interests and passions of the owners and their families and will inspire both new gardeners designing their first perennial bed and accomplished landscapers with acres of “garden rooms.”

    The tour of Concord-area gardens is self-guided and self-paced, beginning each day at 9:00 a.m. and continuing until 4:00 p.m. Garden-goers should arrive at the Museum to pick up their maps prior to starting out. Tickets are good for either or both days, but each garden may only be visited once. No refunds; no photography.

    Tickets: $35 Concord Museum Members, $40 Non-members. Purchase tickets online at www.concordmuseum.org or at the front desk of the Museum, 200 Lexington Road in Concord. 2016 Garden Tour Sponsors are Corbett Incorporated, J. McLaughlin, William Raveis, Alden Landscape Design, with additional support from Bartlett Tree Experts, John de Lellis Gardens, Pumpkin Brook Organic Gardening, Season Four, The Outdoor Living Store, and The Green Lawn Company.

  • Saturday, December 6, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm – Concord Museum Holiday House Tour

    On Saturday, December 6, 2014, eight of Concord’s most beautiful private homes will be professionally decorated in the holiday spirit by local and Boston-based interior designers. Guests will be welcomed inside the front doors of these gracious private residences to visit the charming ground floor rooms. From Colonial to Victorian to Shingle Style and more, each house will be decorated in a different holiday theme. The Concord Museum welcomes you to spend the day in Concord, a small town with a big history, and enjoy the elegant streets, charming cafés and shops, as well as the many historic homes. And new this year, enjoy treats from Trail’s End Café at ticket pick-up, and take a break midway through your tour for complimentary cider and cookies at the Colonial Inn!

    The Guild of Volunteers is organizing this event as a benefit for the education initiatives of the Museum. The House Tour Co-Chairs are Kelly Benkert and Aura Bruce. Tickets may be purchased online at http://www.concordmuseum.org/holiday-house-tour.php, at the Museum, or by phone through December 4: $40 Members, $45 Non-members; after December 4 or day of: $50. No refunds; no photography. Tickets and maps must be picked up at the Museum the day of the tour.

    Special Offer from the Colonial Inn:
    Concord’s Colonial Inn, built in 1716, has a long and distinguished history of hospitality and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The hotel is located in downtown Concord within easy walking access to local shops, the Concord Museum and attractions including the Minuteman National Historical Park. Overnight accommodations for the Concord Museum’s Holiday House Tour are discounted to $119 per night for our Prescott Wing. Please call 978-369-9200 and mention this ad while booking.

  • Friday and Saturday, June 6 and 7 – Garden Affairs Garden Tour

    The famed Concord spokesman for individualism and self-reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, once wrote: “When I go into a good garden, I think, if it were mine, I should never go out of it.” This year the Concord Museum is celebrating 24 years of “going into good gardens” on the annual Concord Garden Tour. The Museum’s Guild of Volunteers has organized this preeminent garden tour, an opportunity both to share in the delights of beautiful and historic private gardens in Concord and to support the Museum’s Education Programs which annually serve 10,000 students from 85 Massachusetts communities and 22 states.

    The Museum’s Garden Tour has become a New England tradition for garden lovers from near and far. The Garden Tour will take place on two days, Friday and Saturday, June 6 and June 7, rain or shine. Each of the private gardens reflects the individual interests and passions of the owners and their families and will inspire both new gardeners designing their first perennial bed and accomplished landscapers with acres of “garden rooms.”

    The tour of Concord-area gardens is self-guided and self-paced, beginning each day at 9:00 a.m. and continuing until 4:00 p.m. Garden-goers should arrive at the Museum to pick up their maps prior to starting out. Tickets are good for either or both days, but each garden may only be visited once. $35 Museum Members, $40 Nonmembers. No refunds; no photography. And don’t forget to stop by the Museum Shop, filled with wonderful garden-related gifts! Purchase tickets at www.concordmuseum.org.

    http://www.concordmuseum.org/assets/Concord-Museum-Garden-Tour.jpg

  • Thursday, April 25, 7:00 pm – Bill McKibben, Environmentalist

    Bill McKibben, an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming, will speak on Thursday, April 25, beginning at 7 pm at The Fenn School. 516 Monument Street in Concord, in a program sponsored by the Concord Museum.

    McKibben, raised in Lexington, Massachusetts, is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him “the planet’s best green journalist” and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was “probably the country’s most important environmentalist.”

    The Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, he holds honorary degrees from a dozen colleges and in 2011 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. $15 ($10 if you are a member of the Concord Museum). Reservations necessary: 978-369-9763, ext. 216.

    http://www.stthomas.edu/news//srv/htdocs/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Bill-McKibben-Newsroom.jpg

  • Friday, April 12 – Sunday, September 15 – Early Spring: Thoreau, Concord, and the Citizen Science Tradition

    Drawing upon its outstanding Thoreau collection, in April 2013 the Concord Museum will present an exhibition and related programs that explore the work of Henry Thoreau as a scientist studying seasonal phenomena. These phenomena include such episodes as the flowering times of flora, arrival dates of migrating birds, leafing out of trees, and ice-up at Walden Pond.

    Thoreau’s choice of Concord as a subject was emulated by a number of citizen scientists, some amateur and some professional, over three centuries.

    Currently, Dr. Richard Primack, Professor of Biology at Boston University, and his team have been systematically comparing the data collected by Thoreau with current data gathered in identical Concord locations. Early Spring will offer general audiences a new understanding of Thoreau and the importance of his work in a contemporary context. The Museum is located on the Cambridge Turnpike at Lexington Road in Cambridge, and hours and directions are available at www.concordmuseum.org.

    http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/winter-spring12/climate-change/climate-change.jpg

  • Tuesday, March 19, 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm – Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation

    The Concord Museum and the Concord Museum Guild of Volunteers will host author Andrea Wulf on Thursday, March 19 at the Concord Museum, Cambridge Turnpike at Lexington Road in Concord, for a lecture beginning at 1 pm.  The talk is the 2013 Mary M. Lesneski Memorial Lecture, on Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation. 

    Founding Gardeners offers a fascinating look at the revolutionary generation from the unique and intimate perspective of their lives as gardeners, plantsmen, and farmers. For the founding fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions, as deeply ingrained in their characters as their belief in liberty for the nation they were creating. Wulf’s stories of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison reveal a guiding, but previously overlooked, ideology of the American Revolution.

    Andrea Wulf was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She lives in Britain where she trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. Her most recent book, Chasing Venus, was published in 2012 in eight countries in conjunction with the last transit of Venus in our century. Wulf has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, and many other newspapers. She has lectured widely to large audiences at the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Society in London, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Monticello, and the Chicago Botanic Garden, among many others. She is a three-time fellow of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence 2013.

    During her visit to Concord, Ms. Wulf will be a Scholar in Residence at the Concord Museum, exploring both the Concord Museum’s collection and the collections of other area institutions for research for a new book.

    As is tradition, Afternoon Tea organized by the Concord Museum’s Guild of Volunteers follows the lecture. The annual Mary M. Lesneski Lecture, begun 34 years ago in memory of a dedicated Concord Museum volunteer, has brought nationally renowned speakers on a variety of topics to the Museum each March. Tickets to the lecture and tea are $30; $25 Concord Museum Members. Reservations are required as space is limited; (978) 369-9763, ext. 216. Books will be available for purchase in the Museum Shop, with a book signing to follow the lecture.

    http://media.cleveland.com/books_impact/photo/9464746-large.jpg

  • Thursday, March 7, 7:00 pm – Farm to Lectern Speakers Series: Brian Donahue

    In association with the exhibition, The Greatest Source of Wealth: Agriculture in Concord, the Farm to Lectern Speakers Series brings nationally-recognized agrarian activists to Concord.  On Thursday, March 7, 2013, the Concord Museum welcomes Brian Donahue, an environmental historian, farmer, and collaborator on the New England Good Food Vision 2060. Donahue is Associate Professor of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University and author of The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord and Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town. He co-founded and for 12 years directed Land’s Sake, a nonprofit community farm in Weston, Massachusetts.  In his talk, Nourishing New England: A Vision for Local and Regional Farming and Healthy Food, Donahue shares a bold vision that calls for our region to build the capacity to produce up to 80% of clean, fair, just and accessible food for all New Englanders by 2060.

    The event will begin at 7:00 p.m. at the Concord Museum. The speakers series is free, but reservations are requested, 978-369-9763 ext. 216.

    http://yalepress.yale.edu/images/full13/9780300089127.jpg

  • Anne Brooke Begins Presidency of Friends of the Public Garden

    The board of directors of the Friends of the Public Garden has elected Anne Brooke as president. Brooke has been on the Friends board for more than six years, serving as co-chair of the Development and Membership Committees and as a member of the Executive Committee. She and her husband, Peter, live in the Back Bay.

    The Friends of the Public Garden, founded in 1970, works with the City of Boston to protect and enhance Boston’s first public parks–-the Boston Common, Public Garden, and Commonwealth Avenue Mall. Brooke is only its second president, succeeding founder Henry Lee.

    President Emeritus Henry Lee said, “The Friends is enormously fortunate to have someone of the intelligence, nonprofit experience, and sound judgment as Anne Brooke assuming the presidency at this important time in the organization’s life. Under her leadership I know the Friends will continue to prosper.”

    Anne Brooke said, “It is an honor for me to serve as the president of the Friends of the Public Garden. We all at the Friends look forward to continuing our work with the Parks Department. This wonderful organization has done so much for the Boston community by providing hundreds of thousands of dollars, each year, to assist the city in the care of our parks. I sincerely encourage all of our friends and neighbors here in the city to join the Friends in supporting the Boston Common, Public Garden and Commonwealth Avenue Mall so that we are able to continue to maintain, preserve and improve the quality of care for our three historic green spaces.”

    Brooke has long and varied experience as a leader in nonprofit organizations. She is active with the Massachusetts Audubon Society, where she served as a board member for twenty years and as vice-president for ten of those years. She was instrumental in establishing the Boston Nature Center in Mattapan, at the end of the Emerald Necklace. Currently she is an Overseer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and of the Museum of Fine Arts, a Visitor to the Harvard Art Museums, and a member of the Council of Overseers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.  While living in Concord, Massachusetts, where she and her husband raised three sons, Brooke served as president of the Concord Garden Club, chairman of the Historic Districts Commission, and president of the board of the Concord Museum.

    Brooke takes the helm at an exciting time for the Friends. Last spring, the organization completed the first phase of the most ambitious project in its 42 year history, renovation of Brewer Fountain Plaza and its adjacent landscape at the southeast corner of the Common. Last year, thousands of park users enjoyed the revitalized space animated with a food truck, tables and chairs, a reading room and piano music at lunchtime. The Friends will complete this $4 million revitalization effort over the next year. Its campaign to raise funds for the project is well underway, attracting gifts of all sizes from across the community. The final project phase includes more landscaping and restoration of the historic iron fence along Tremont Street.

    The Friends continues its primary mission of funding the expert care of trees and sculpture in all three parks. This month a first phase of new tree labels in the Garden is being installed. A second major turf restoration project will be implemented on the Mall in 2013, and planning for landscape improvements to the Boylston Street boundary of the Garden has begun.

  • Thursday, January 17, 7:00 pm – Folks, This Ain’t Normal

    In association with the exhibition, The Greatest Source of Wealth: Agriculture in Concord, the Farm to Lectern Speakers Series brings nationally-recognized agrarian activists to Concord.

    On Thursday, January 17, 2013, the Concord Museum welcomes Joel Salatin, author and full-time farmer at Polyface, a multi-generational, beyond organic farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. In his talk, Folks, This Ain’t Normal, based on his book by the same title, Salatin gives a whimsical performance filled with history, satire, and prophecy in defense of small farms, local food systems, and the right to opt out of the conventional food paradigm. He relates his dirt-under-the-fingernails experiences with mischievous humor and based firmly on a lifetime spent communing with ecology, economics, and emotion in their full reality, as a farmer. Both sobering and inspiring, his performance empowers people to tackle the seemingly impossibly large tasks that confront our generation.

    Book signing to follow lecture. 7:00 p.m., at the Fenn School, 516 Monument Street in Concord. The speakers series is free, but reservations are requested, 978-369-9763 ext. 216.